


Dancing In Circles

by fouryearslaterdrabbles (CheshireCatLife)



Category: Black Widow (Movie), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: And Captain America, Anger, Angst, F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovery, a) they’re hard to write, and the winter soldier, and there's no other characters because, b) endgame screwed up many things, basically just a short little story about how black widow, but also kind of sad way, hence the winter soldier fic five years after it came out, in a sweet way, including Captain America’s ending, recover from the fallout of winter soldier, together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 05:08:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21422686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheshireCatLife/pseuds/fouryearslaterdrabbles
Summary: The Black Widow lies in tatters. Her masks are burnt; only her last defences are left. She is alone, by choice. It's easier that way. The Winter Soldier believes the same. It's the conditioning. The Russians were always fond of their assets' loneliness. Steve isn't.He very much isn't.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Natasha Romanov
Kudos: 11





	Dancing In Circles

**Author's Note:**

> I just read a few WinterWidowShield fics and thought they were really cute and deserved another addition. This is something I wrote very quickly and is hence un-beta'd or checked but I didn't want it lying around. Comment if you want to see more :)

They dance around each other. There’s too much lingering underneath the surface for anything more. Bucky relentlessly hides in the corpse of his own body, trying to scramble out of his overactive mind. Natasha dances gracefully through the chaos, as silent as the spider she personifies, but just as unnoticeable. Steve storms his way through it, heavy footsteps like thunder that make the other two dart away.

It’s like a loop in their minds. Promises of trust, friendship and reunion like a curse on their fragile relationships that none of them can bear to face it. Bucky is no longer Bucky, nor is he their asset. Natasha doesn’t know what she is at all: she’s been too many things for that. Steve knows exactly who is, but he doesn’t know what he wants.

Maybe he just wants them.

It’s unfamiliar, the longing. It’s not like Peggy; it’s not that romantic pull that’s as undeniable as it is strong. It’s a reliance, on friendships that have taken him through his darkest times. It’s not like Sam, who’s still at his side, making him smile when it all bears down on him again. Natasha is gone, and Steve knows she’s struggling. She still makes contact, so he knows she’s close. He knows if he really tried, he could see her again.

He doesn’t understand why he can’t.

Or maybe he does. He’s tracking Bucky too, watching the red dot fly across the map, destroying Hydra bases on it’s way. It’s their agreement. Bucky finishes what he started and Steve tracks where he is in case of…

Well, Steve isn’t sure. Sam says it’s a comfort thing. Steve understands that, he really does (he feels it) but he denies it anyway.

But, with tracking Bucky, comes with a fear of contacting Natasha. He knows they had history, and are dancing around each other as much as he’s dancing around them. They’re silent shadows, ghosts from a forgotten past, sharing the darkness together.

By no means does Steve think he’s the light, he’s just as broken as they are by now, buried under the dirt of expectation. But maybe he’s a beacon to guide them back. He wants his best friend back. He wants his best friend_s_ back. Because Natasha is now as close to him as Sam is. It’s surprising, in a way, how a three day crusade can reveal a deeper friendship than two years can. Or how a friendship can grow from nothing in little more than a teasing run. The whiplash hits Steve but he refuses to let it hurt. He’s got Sam (though he spends a lot of time doing normal people stuff that Steve can’t even begin to comprehend). But he hasn’t got the last two. The last of their quartet.

Sam says not to sweat about it, that they’ll come back eventually, and it makes Steve wonder whether he’s too involved in this. Sam seems so casual, even though he’s close to Natasha too, even if it’s less than he’s bonded with Steve. Maybe he understands too that Bucky and Natasha will likely come back as a pair, and Sam had made his position on Bucky quite clear.

Steve doesn’t know where the understanding comes from. Neither have any proof. Maybe it’s just their symmetries that breeds his certainty. They’re both running, but they both trust Steve (more than they’ll ever admit). He believes they’ll come back to him. And maybe it will just take the strength of being together to do that.

He really believes that. He has to.

*

Natasha’s masks are strewn around her, each costume torn to shreds. Wigs that remind her of pasts long gone are singed and blackened. An anger still pumps through her veins, one that she can’t reign in. Her whole life has relied on composure and finally she’s just…broken.

She’s broken in only the way Natasha can: silently. Tears stream but no sobs come. She doesn’t shout as she tears fabric to threads. She doesn’t make a sound as she holds up the lighter. She doesn’t make a face, as blank as the Red Room made her, she just rages like a hurricane that no one can see.

She’s a ghost, tormenting the living. But it’s only her in the room. And it’s only herself that she can torment. The loneliness is battle but not crippling. She wishes it wasn’t there, tries to forget it exists, but it persists. It does not debilitate. But it persists.

It persists when she lays her head on her pillow, dressed only in an underwear and bra, encased in memories of blood and gore. She places a hand on her hip and pretends it’s someone else’s. She pretends to hear a male voice in her head, soft and gentle. It’s got a hint of Brooklyn, and that’s enough to snap her out of it. She wraps herself tightly in the covers. It’s an awful position if she were to be attacked but it’ll loosen soon enough. For now, she just needs to feel safe.

She never feels safe.

She wakes up and the chaos hasn’t cleared itself up. Of course it hadn’t. The safe house’s floor is charred but she can’t find it within herself to care. The landlord is an old contact who will laugh and tut and call her names that make her skin crawl uncomfortably.

She pours herself a bowl of cereal and downs a glass of water but doesn’t get in the shower. She wants to feel the ash on her for a bit longer, if only to remind herself that she’s starting over. She’s going to become an Avenger; she’s going to become Natasha Romanoff, whoever that is. She won’t be a spy anymore. She won’t be under someone else’s rule. She will have her Captain but she will be free.

She will remain in the shadows but she won’t be trapped in them. Not anymore.

Finally, she peels herself off the bar stool and takes a quick shower, taking minimal time to scrub herself of the black. She regrets it as soon as she’s faced with the clean up job she has to do. She can’t leave the evidence lying about so she’s going to have to take another round with the soot and just hope it doesn’t get stuck in her hair again. The shower has left her hair in tight curls, a style she’s not too fond of but doesn’t have the time to change, so she ties it back into a lazy bun that her instructors would have once beat her for. Then, she gets to work.

It’s not all that hard. She just needs to stuff all of it in a bag to put in a place no one will find it. Or maybe burn it. But she’s not sure if she can do a second round. It covers her hands again but she washes them easily and ties together the bin bag with ruthless efficiency.

It’s done.

Now, where to go. Natasha is anything but indecisive but she finds herself stumped. What do you do when there’s not a mission to do? An order to follow? She’s free. And she finds herself cursing it.

She ends up in Russia.

She refuses to put on a disguise but she’s also all over the media, and she’d rather not be harassed, so she uses the endlessly fooling cap (ha!) and hoodie combination as she roams the streets of Saint Petersburg. She remembers when it was still Petrograd, and then Leningrad, and for the hundredth time in so many days, she wonders how old she must be.

Older than anyone has the right to be.

She is not immortal, she knows that, but she wonders if she was ever put in the ice. She was the best Widow, she was made to be preserved, she was steel whilst the others were stone. She was born before 1914, that’s for sure, but she knows nothing but the modern world.

What’s happened to her?

Why doesn’t she remember?

What’s true and what’s false. What did the implant and what is hers and hers alone. Was that thought placed there to confuse her, or is she genuinely over a century old. She feels bad for teasing Steve now. He may be a nonagenarian, but she may be more than a centenarian. She may be immortal. And doesn’t that scare her more than death ever can. Endless suffering. She’s watched empires, governments and agencies falls. But to know she’ll watch forever: she can’t even begin to comprehend it. That unknown chills her bones. The loneliness makes them ache.

Maudlin thoughts aside, she’s glad she’s ended up in Lenin- Saint Petersburg. It’s beautiful, and it’s home in a way. The Red Room hadn’t really been all that near, and was probably much closer to Moscow, but it was still the motherland and no matter how much Natasha wanted to hate it, it was her culture: evil or not.

She wonders if Bucky thinks the same. Even if his blood is American, does he feel Russian? He probably lived in Russian for as long if not longer than he lived in Brooklyn.

She roams the streets, in search of something familiar when she finds it. It’s not familiar, not really. It’s just a small cafe on the street corner, with pastries in the window and flowery Cyrillic on the front. Hanging flowers dangle from the awnings and the sweet smell of baked goods wafts its way into the street. It takes her back to a secret moment in her childhood, one she’s never told anyone before. She doesn’t even think he remembers it. But it was her twelfth birthday and she’d broken her ankle again. She had continued on, ignoring the debilitating pain on her left side, but had collapsed (to anyone else, it looked like she moved no differently) onto her bed. When the night wardens came round and chained them to the bed posts, she was ready to suffer through her birthday in silence. It wasn’t her true birthday. It was the one she’d chosen for herself and told no one.

Except him.

He snuck in at night, drenched in blood and a key in his hand. In the shadows, he sequestered them into a secret corner of the compound and commanded dead-silence with just a single movement. She had nodded, even when he brought a small cake out of one of his hundred pockets. The lingering hint of gunpowder in the air was immediately overcome by the powerful smell of sugar. She wasn’t sure how no one caught them on smell alone but the soldier was clever, he must have done something.

“For me?” She mouthed in Russian, cradling the _kulich_ like a baby. She could imagine it now as a full cake, a candle in the top (even then, she wasn’t sure if it would really be a dozen).

“Of course, little spider.” She’ was still not proficient in lip reading but he was careful to widen his mouth as he spoke. It spoke care in itself.

“Thank you…” she stared at the ground, hoping it would mean he wouldn’t catch what she said “papa”. Quickly, impossibly quickly, he grabbed her chin and wrenched her head upwards. “I will never be your father,” he mouthed so quickly she almost couldn’t catch it. “I can’t be and you don’t really want me to be. I am simply your friend, okay? A friend.” It was in English, which threw her so far off her usual game that she thought she might have made a face.

“A friend?”

“Always. Until…until the end?” It wasn’t meant to be a question, that much was clear, but it was like he thought the saying was wrong. It was in the way he scrunched up his eyebrows, a small twist of confusion edging his lips downwards. It wasn’t the right thing to say anyway. Natasha didn’t mind. It was theirs now.

Friends…until the end.

It was one of the few nights that there had been no punishment at the end of it. Even then, the Soldier was one of the best operatives, even against his own people. Now, it seems funny, the minor rebelling agains the people he’d once fought a war against. She supposes it’s a sad memory in retrospect but she doesn’t mind. She goes into the bakery and gets their largest _kulich_ and eats it like she’s starving. It’s then that she feels the overwhelming urge to return. She doesn’t; she’s too careful that. But she’s not whether it’s the warmth of nostalgia or the memory of the soldier but she wants to see them both: James and Steve. She wants to see James’ reaction to the _kulich_, see if he remembers. She wants to see Steve’s bright smile when she sees her.

But her head is too dark, and all she can really see is Steve’s anger at her disappearance, or the blank slate of the soldier after conditioning.

And now she knows what that conditioning really is.

She will not go back. It’s fear holding her back, she’s perfectly aware of that. But instincts are her guide; they don’t fail her. And they won’t fail her now.

*

Bucky is not Bucky. He is not Bucky, the soldier, the asset, a Barnes, a-

He is not anything.

He is not a machine, or a gun, or a person or a monster.

He is nothing.

He is in Germany. He doesn’t know what leads him back here. There is no bases left to destroy; they were the first to go, the originals. Russia and Germany in smoulders. He’s back maybe because he’s surprised. He hasn’t been to Berlin since 1983, when the division was still crippling Germany. He’d been in East Germany, shooting those who tried to get to the other side. It’s different now.

He swallows down the guilt and moves on.

Berlin is beautiful in the sun. He walks cross the line where the wall used to be and tries to remember what it had looked like then. Gloomy, he thinks, but that might be his head trying to procure some dramatic pathetic fallacy for the sake of his already fragile mind.

He doesn’t think he’s human; he’s not sure if he feels guilt like other’s do, he doesn’t know if he remembers in the same way. But he does. Remembers, he means. Feels guilt. It’s all there, buried under the bedrock of his skin. But the facade is collapsing. Without a mission, without an aim, he is burdened. Freedom is nothing something he can stand. Yet he has to.

And if there’s anything about him that’s stayed, from the beginning of his life to now, is that he survives.

He haunts Berlin day and night now. He can’t leave but he knows he shouldn’t stay. Steve is watching him, he knows that. They made a deal. He’d done anything so he didn’t have to look at those blue eyes anymore. Anything. Even being tracked. It won’t take long until Steve approaches, wondering what’s happening. He hopes that Steve thinks he’s doing recon, finding a base that neither of them had spotted before.

It gives him a few days.

In that time, he tries to understand his newfound freedom. He lets the memories pulse in his head, lets sickening smells remind him of fatal shots and sweet sights remind him of funny accents and blonde hair.

He doesn’t have an accent anymore.

He doesn’t even have a language.

Once his time has run out, and the new release of memories has puttered out, he leaves. He thinks he’ll come back, though. He likes to sit in the memorial, hidden by towering blocks of black and remember. He knows the people he killed are not part of this memorial, but he likes to think that they could be if he wanted them to. It’s for horrors the Nazis committed in the war, but he thinks he can add the atrocities they committed afterwards. They deserve recognition, he thinks. He deserves to be punished.

But he won’t be. Because he survives. And he knows what the final punishment is.


End file.
